Oooooh kaaaaay. Nice Marketing Spin.
I wasn't trained as a scientist, but I was trained as an engineer (Electrical, thanks for asking!), and while that's not exactly the same thing, it left me very well versed in the Scientific Method. More importantly (from a
So yeah, you can count me as one of those "skeptics".
What do we mean that something is "scientific"? You should start here, because the core principles of science are easy to understand. More importantly, it's easy for someone to spin you if you don't understand them.
Global Warming in a nutshell. This is a high-level overview of the whole situation.
Remember the "Hockey Stick"? It's what Al Gore used to hype Global Warming in his movie. You don't hear much about it any more, because it turns out that it's a lot of bunk. The data was dodgy and the computer program that did the statistical calculations makes hockey stick shaped graphs out of random data - say, the phone numbers in the telephone directory.
Just how many thermometers are used to measure the Earth's temperature? How many were used 100 years ago? 200? So how do we know that "1998 was the hottest year in 1000 years"? But Borepatch, I hear you say, surely it can't be that bad! Sure can.
The word that you will never hear from
Science is about the data (and also about reproduceability). So how good is the data? Terrible. Really terrible. Unbelievably terrible (this one is simply mind-blowing). It's so bad that NOAA - the government agency that runs the nation's weather stations - doesn't even try to get accurate readings any more.
Did you know that the climate data has been manipulated (it's called "adjusted")? Did you know that if you just looked at the "raw" (unadjusted) data, there has been no warming at all since 1850?
Skeptics suggest that the temperature record is biased upwards by the "Urban Heat Island" (UHI) effect - that as cities grow, weather stations that had previously been sited in cool meadows now find themselves in the middle of hot asphalt parking lots. The "consensus" view of Climate Science is that UHI is minor, if it exists at all. The problem with this poo-poo response is that a sixth grader can show that UHI is real, and serious.
A very large portion of the case for Global Warming comes from computer models. Just how reliable are these models? Not very.
What does history tell us about climate? Quite a bit, actually, and the climate data do not explain this well. Translation: the climate reconstructions are falsified by historical records.
But what about the "consensus"? Quite a few scientists are as skeptical of Global Warming as I am.
So why are so many scientists caught up in what's clearly a pretty shaky hypothesis? It's almost a religious debate. And not in a good way.
Bad public policy recommendations based on Global Warming hysteria: starve children, kill pets, "green" electricity that's far dirtier than coal plants.
There are a bunch more posts here, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment.
Borepatch - as another EE you'll probably appreciate that one of the first things that raised my hackles was a comparison between modeled results and reality. I do a lot of circuit and system simulation, especially microwave nonlinear simulations. These simulators are expensive programs that are the result of many millions in corporate R&D money, decades of refinement by hundreds of Ph.D.s and they still never get it exactly right.
ReplyDeleteAs a result, I don't automatically trust computer models, so I was not impressed. Then I started looking into Anthony Watts surface stations project. That led to seeing the way the temperature series are adjusted. I can see making an adjustment once when you fill in the inevitable gaps in the data. But when they're adjusting them repeatedly, that's just plain suspicious.
If you really look at the whole climate change (or whatever it is this week) mess, in the critical way a scientist should, it unravels pretty quickly.
Why is unadjusted data any better than "adjusted" data? Neither properly considers equipment and site conditions.
ReplyDeleteTJP, when the adjustments account for 80% of the warming during the 20th century, they become an issue. When the adjustments do not seem to correct for Urban Heat Island effects, they become an issue. When the vast bulk of the adjustments are positive (saying in effect that the thermometers read low), they become an issue.
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with the idea of adjustments in theory. I have very strong reservations as to how they are being applied today.
Look at the link that suggests that there has been NO warming since 1850. I suspect that this statement is extreme, but when you look at the numbers, it's very, very disturbing.
If I may add, when they adjust the series, it started out primarily because of gaps in the record. Joe the weatherman in Bumfuq Nebraska didn't trudge across the snow - or through the tornado - to get the afternoon reading. Or Joe was sick and days are missing.
ReplyDeleteIn either case, you don't know what the missing temperature was, and they've come up with various ways of filling the gaps. Various deceptive ways to fill in the gaps.
What gets me is they keep changing them over and over, as if the first adjustment didn't give them the answer they wanted. As the old saying goes, if you torture numbers long enough, they'll confess to anything, and it really looks like that's what they do.
I know, but without studying the history of every individual weather station, it's impossible--I mean there's no point of reference. How is it possible to argue that an adjustment is incorrect without presenting indisputable facts about what it should be?
ReplyDeleteI don't even see the point of arguing about the influence of UHI when a thermometer is sitting next to the exchanger on an air conditioner. They're doing things like grouping weather stations by region to determine the ones with anomalous readings, but when anywhere from zero to 'N' of those stations are immediately influenced by man-made factors, the inconsistent station might by the one that's actually giving an accurate reading.
The only way to know is by performing due diligence of site history. It's hard work, and requires more manpower than Anthony Watts and few of his readers. In the unlikely event that this is actually done, I think that so many stations will need to be excluded that calculating a "global mean" would be a dubious enterprise.
What I'm saying is that it is equally likely that there has been a warming trend, a cooling trend or no discernible trend in the global mean temperature, (whatever that is, and however it is correctly calculated.) I'm also skeptical of arbitrarily picking end points on such a minuscule atmospheric record. If those are the rules, anyone can play. Hey, climate warmed dramatically between 1800 and 1998! No wait, it didn't change between 1934 and 1998! Oh wait, my bad, it's cooled from 1934 to 1977. See?
wv = "cookin"; what you do with polluted weather station data when it's too much work to research individual station histories.
TJP - I think you're exactly right.
ReplyDeleteI can sort of see back-filling a missing reading or two, by taking nearby stations and finagling them somehow. But Hansen and those guys have gone way past that to (IMO) actual criminal fraud.